VERB is definitely a handy utility to have laying around. While looking at SHOW DISPLAY, I found an undocumented qualifier: SHOW DISPLAY/SYMBOL It appears to take the SHOW DISPLAY information and stores it in a set of DCL symbols starting with the prefix DECW$DISPLAY. This is on a VMS 5.4-1A system, so older versions of VMS may not have it. Here is a quick and dirty example: $ SHOW DISPLAY/SYMBOL Device: WSA47: [super] Node: MCMAHON.GROVERS-MILL.YOYODYNE.COM Transport: TCPIP Server: 0 Screen: 1 $ SHOW SYMBOL DECW$DISPLAY* DECW$DISPLAY_NODE == "MCMAHON.GROVERS-MILL.YOYODYNE.COM" DECW$DISPLAY_SCREEN == "1" DECW$DISPLAY_SERVER == "0" DECW$DISPLAY_TRANSPORT == "TCPIP" Very helpful if you need the results of a SHOW DISPLAY command in a DCL procedure.